Overflow Crowd

As recent as 1949...

Overflow Crowd

Have you ever attended a game with an overflow crowd?

I think I did once. I have a very vague memory of attending Salt Lake Trappers games in the old Pioneer League sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I’m pretty sure I went to at least one that had overflow standing room in foul territory.

It’s rare, of course. And you can imagine my surprise when I saw this article:

From The Sporting News, June 8, 1949, page 2

This Dan Daniel article is kind of strange. Daniel goes into considerable detail about the upcoming July meeting, rather than offering more insight into just what happened in that May 30 game. In fact, I cut this article slightly to eliminate extraneous chatter at the end.

I did a little bit of searching to try to come up with more information about the May 30 game. Unfortunately, New York’s Daily News didn’t have much to add:

From Daily News (New York, New York), May 31, 1949, page 46

Washington DC’s Evening Star wasn’t much help, either:

From Evening Star (Washington, DC), May 31, 1949, page 18

Not even The New York Times helps us much in its description of that second game:

From The New York Times, May 31, 1949, page 27

The Washington Post was a bit better:

From The Washington Post, May 31, 1949, page 16

All in all, though, I found this a bit disappointing. This very well may have been the last time an American League game saw an overflow crowd — and yet it seems that none of the major newspapers had much to say about it.